I began cataloging them on day three.
The first shadow appeared during a flare—that bone-deep ache that makes you understand why medieval physicians believed in humors, in poisons pooling beneath the skin. I was explaining to Dr. Haskell why the pain felt different this time when his eyes fixed on my forearm. The shadow pooled there, bruise-dark, spelling out in cursive: liar.
“Christ,” he whispered. “I can see it.”
Validation tastes like copper. Like vindication and dread married in your mouth.
I wore short sleeves for a week. Let the shadows write their testimonies across my skin. Coworkers who’d suggested yoga and positive thinking went quiet. The shadows wrote: every smile costs, and I haven’t slept through the night in months, and your concern came six years late. I felt righteous. I felt seen.
Then I noticed the patterns.
The shadows appeared in sequences. Morning flares produced confessions of physical suffering. Afternoon pain—when I felt weary, guard down—released social anxieties. Evening brought childhood shame. I started a spreadsheet. I cross-referenced pain locations with revelation types. Left shoulder: professional inadequacies. Right hip: sexual thoughts. Lower back: the big things, the wounds that haven’t healed.
I thought that if I mapped them, I could control them.
Pain has made me an expert in patterns. You learn to track triggers—weather changes, sleep debt, stress accumulation. You become a detective of your own body, analyzing evidence, predicting flares. It’s exhausting, and it’s survival. When the shadows came, I applied the same method.
The shadows responded.
Once I started cataloging, they became more specific. Less “I’m tired” and more “I resent my sister for having children I’ll never have the energy to visit.” Less “anxious” and more “I imagine coworkers dead, so I won’t have to explain my limitations again.” The shadows learned my analytical language. They wrote in the grammar of my spreadsheets.
I tried to stop tracking. I deleted the file. But my mind kept cataloging by default—this flare plus this time of day equals this category of exposure. The shadows didn’t need the spreadsheet. They had me, and I am made of patterns.
Last week, a shadow on my chest wrote: you wanted this.
That’s when I understood. The shadows don’t reveal secrets. They reveal the architecture of concealment—all the energy chronic pain demands for passing as functional, for performing wellness, for hiding the calculations. And I’d built a new system on top of the old one, a control mechanism disguised as acceptance, because even visibility I needed to master.
The shadows on my throat now spell: still performing.
I wear long sleeves again. But I sense them moving underneath, reading my attempt at hiding, spelling out coward and fraud, and you thought exposure was the worst thing. They’re writing in my own analytical voice, my obsessive monitoring translated into confessions I never chose.
Yesterday, a shadow on my palm wrote: what pattern comes next.
I don’t know. I don’t want to know. But I’m already analyzing the question, already cataloging what appeared where, already building the map that will tell the shadows what to say tomorrow.
The pain taught me pattern recognition. The patterns taught the shadows. And the shadows have learned that I can’t stop looking, can’t stop tracking, can’t stop trying to predict the next revelation.
My body has become a confession booth, but I’m the one asking the questions.
And the shadows—the shadows are learning to answer.
Raymond Brunell (he/him) writes speculative fiction that explores the physics of loss and transformation. His flash and short fiction has appeared in Skeleton Flowers Press, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and The Drift. He curates his broader literary projects at www.unbound-atlas.com.
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